Houston Astros: Caught Stealing | Uncovering the Scheme | 5

Summary

American Scandal: Houston Astros - Caught Stealing | Uncovering the Scheme | Episode 5

Release Date: November 12, 2024

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Introduction and Background

In this episode of American Scandal, host Lindsey Graham delves deep into the infamous Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, exploring how a beloved baseball team became synonymous with deceit and the profound implications it had on the sport's integrity. Joined by Evan Drelich, a senior writer for The Athletic and author of Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess, the discussion unpacks the intricate details of the scandal, its exposure, and the aftermath that reshaped Major League Baseball (MLB).

The Rise of the Houston Astros

Evan Drelich provides a comprehensive overview of the Astros’ transformation from a struggling team to World Series champions in 2017. He explains that the Astros had embarked on an ambitious rebuilding project, intentionally tanking to secure top draft picks. By the time new ownership under Jim Crane and executive Jeff Luno took the helm, the team had already accumulated star players like George Springer and Jose Altuve, positioning them for success.

Evan Drelich [04:04]: "When they finally did get good, it was not surprising, that was the plan all along, that they would suffer through these years of bad baseball and that they would accumulate and stockpile these top players and eventually they would get good."

Implementing the Sign-Stealing Scheme

The conversation transitions to the heart of the scandal: the Astros' sign-stealing methods. Drelich explains how the team exploited video technology and subtle cues to decode opposing catchers' signs during games, providing hitters with real-time information.

Evan Drelich [06:13]: "What was violative was using electronics. You were not allowed to use electronics to aid in sign stealing. The cardinal sin of the Astros scheme is using off the field electronics."

Drelich outlines the evolution of the scheme, starting with a basic Excel spreadsheet dubbed "Codebreaker" used for logging pitch signs. This system was later expanded under the influence of former Yankees manager Carlos Beltrán and introduced more sophisticated methods, including using live camera feeds and trash can banging to communicate pitch information to hitters without the need for a player on second base.

Evan Drelich [19:07]: "Instead of having a guy on second base, they placed a monitor near the dugout that interpreted the signs in real-time, and then a banging on the garbage can signaled the type of pitch to the batter."

Investigative Journalism and Reporting

Evan Drelich recounts his journey in uncovering the scandal. Initially covering the Astros for the Houston Chronicle, Drelich faced resistance from the organization when attempting to publish stories hinting at irregularities. After being laid off from NBC Sports Boston, Drelich joined The Athletic, where alongside Ken Rosenthal, he pursued the investigation more aggressively.

Evan Drelich [12:54]: "I joined The Athletic in May of 2019...We needed more sources. And so eventually, Ken Rosenthal and I set out to get more. And I'm glad we eventually got it done, it worked out properly."

The pivotal moment came when former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers went on the record, providing undeniable evidence that solidified the scandal and validated Drelich and Rosenthal’s findings.

Evan Drelich [23:06]: "Mike Fiers was willing to go on the record with us. In the original story, we quoted Mike Fiers explaining that he wanted the game cleaned up, that he was tired of it."

Exposure and Public Reaction

The publication of the expose in November 2019 triggered immediate and widespread outrage within the baseball community and among fans. The Astros’ methods were condemned as a blatant violation of the sport’s integrity, far surpassing previous minor infractions by other teams.

Evan Drelich [25:07]: "I think most people were outraged within hours...people were stunned because there was suspicion amongst other players and other teams about what was going on."

Public sentiment was particularly harsh towards Mike Fiers, who faced backlash for breaking the “locker room code” and bringing the truth to light despite the personal and professional risks involved.

Evan Drelich [24:03]: "Mike Fiers was a whistleblower...it takes a lot of courage to do it. It's a great burden for someone to decide to step out."

Consequences and Punishments

Despite the severity of the scandal, the repercussions for the Astros were relatively lenient. The team received a $5 million fine, the maximum allowable under MLB’s constitution, and lost their first two draft picks. Key executives, including Jeff Luno, Alex Cora, and Carlos Beltrán, were fired across different teams. However, the players involved were granted immunity, a decision that sparked significant controversy and dissatisfaction among fans and other players.

Evan Drelich [32:22]: "Major League Baseball issues the maximum allowable fine...They did not discipline the players. The players were granted immunity in this process."

Drelich criticizes MLB's handling of the situation, suggesting that Commissioner Rob Manfred erred by not imposing stricter penalties on the players to preserve the league’s authority.

Evan Drelich [36:34]: "Rob Manfred believed that if he had tried to punish [the players], the union would have been able to overturn or vacate those punishments. He thought that was going to be a mistake, that he would look weak."

Impact on Baseball Integrity and Future Regulations

The scandal ignited a broader conversation about the integrity of baseball and the role of technology in the sport. Drelich highlights MLB’s subsequent efforts to curb such practices by introducing wrist devices for catchers to communicate pitches and imposing stricter controls on video usage during games.

Evan Drelich [39:32]: "MLB, after the sign-stealing scandal, put in an electronic solution...There are restrictions around video usage during games."

Despite these measures, Drelich remains skeptical about the ability to completely eradicate cheating in baseball, likening it to perpetual challenges faced in other sports and corporate environments.

Evan Drelich [40:43]: "People are always going to cheat in baseball...I don't think there's any doubt people are still cheating in some capacity, in some ways in baseball."

Conclusion

The Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal remains one of the most significant and controversial moments in modern baseball history. Through meticulous investigation and courageous reporting, Evan Drelich and Ken Rosenthal exposed a complex web of deceit that not only tarnished the Astros’ legacy but also prompted MLB to reevaluate and reinforce the rules governing technology and fair play. This episode of American Scandal underscores the delicate balance between competitive advantage and ethical conduct in sports, and the enduring impact such scandals have on both the game and its fans.

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Transcript

[Lindsey Graham]

Wondery subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus and the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts from Wonder I'm Lindsey Graham and this is American Scandal.

[Evan Drelich]

Here's a ground ball right side could do it the Houston Astros are World Champions for the first time in franchise.

[Lindsey Graham]

History that's the sound of the Houston Astros winning Game 7 against the Dodgers to become World Series champions in 2017. As the players and owner Jim Crane reveled in the victory, one announcer said, this well run organization gets to celebrate here at Dodger Stadium. But beyond the champagne and commissioner's trophy, a dark cloud swirled all around. Baseball insiders began to talk, alleging the Astros had invented a system of sign stealing that involved using video technology and banging on trash cans. At least one fan noticed a distinct pattern to the thumping and questions and rumors began to swirl. When inside sources tipped off reporter Evan Drelich, he knew it might be a huge story. And it was. Drelich and fellow reporter Ken Rosenthal broke the Astro sign stealing scandal for the Athletic, and Evan joins me today. He's a senior writer for the Athletic, covering baseball and the author of the book Winning Fixes Everything How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports Biggest Mess. Our conversation is next. American Scandal is sponsored by Audible, whose best of 2024 picks are here. Discover the year's top audiobooks and originals in all your favorite genres, from memoirs and sci fi to mysteries and thrillers. Audible's curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best in audio entertainment, like a stunning new full cast production of George Orwell's 1984 heartfelt memoirs like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's lovely one. The year's best fiction, like the Women by Kristin Hannah and Percival Everett's brilliantly subversive title James or a personal pick of mine, Malcolm Gladwell's latest audiobook, Revenge of the Tipping Point. Find a new favorite and get listening with Audible because there's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com as and discover all the year's best waiting for you. American Scandal is Sponsored by T Mobile 5G Home Internet. With new home Internet plus from T Mobile, you can get Internet right where you want it so you can boost your connection to places it hasn't reached before and transform your home Turn your backyard into a movie theater, turn your basement into a home office. For a limited time, get a free upgrade to T Mobile Home Internet plus while supplies last. Home Internet plus starts at just 50 bucks a month with autopay and any voice line. Check availability@t mobile.com home Internet and get Internet right where you want it. During congestion, customers on this plan may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction if using greater than 1.2 terabytes per month due to data prioritization. After $20 bill credit plus $5 per month without autopay, debit or bank account required. Regulatory fees included. For qualifying accounts. $35 connection charge applies. Evandrelich, thanks for speaking with me today on American Scandal.

[Evan Drelich]

Hello, Lindsey. Thanks for having me.

[Lindsey Graham]

So, as someone who's covered the Astros for the Houston Chronicle for a fair amount of time, I'd love to know what your thoughts were when they began to rise as a team and then win the World Series in 2017.

[Evan Drelich]

You know, they had undertaken this really ambitious losing project. They had tanked for a number of years to try to acquire top draft picks and thereby rebuild. And so when they finally did get good, it was not surprising, that was the plan all along, that they would suffer through these years of bad baseball and that they would accumulate and stockpile these top players and eventually they would get good. And frankly, when the current administration took over, they already had some good players in the organization. They had George Springer, they had Jose Altuve, they had Dallas Kaiko. So they weren't starting from nothing. But the idea was that it would take a long rebuild to get to a point of contention.

[Lindsey Graham]

And how was it to go through these painful years?

[Evan Drelich]

The Astros had never won a World Series. It was a fan base in a franchise that was starved and ready for something different. And you had this gregarious and charming executive in Jeff Leno come in and you had an owner in Jim Crane who had not been a major league owner before. And so they represented something shiny and new and transformative for an organization that through every other attempt and every other method they had employed, had never really gotten anywhere. The fan base was basically ready for anything, even as painful as it was.

[Lindsey Graham]

So to the point of our series sign stealing now, it and other shenanigans have been around in the game, you know, as long as the game has existed. But what did Major League Baseball allow in terms of stealing signs in 2017? What was considered acceptable and what was.

[Evan Drelich]

Forbidden, what's always been allowed is if you were a runner on base, if you're a runner on second base, you can use your eyes to stare in and see if you can pick up what the catcher is throwing down. If you can detect that, okay, one Means fastball, which is traditionally what one has meant when a catcher flashes the number one between his legs, it's all fair game. What was violative at the time, in a broad sense, there weren't as many specific rules as there should have been. But what was violative was using electronics. You were not allowed to use electronics to aid in sign stealing. The cardinal sin of the asterisk scheme is using off the field electronics. It is not the fact that they stole signs at all. It is the method and how they did it, which totally eliminated the field of Play.

[Lindsey Graham]

But in 2017, this using electronics was perhaps a gray area by the letter of the law.

[Evan Drelich]

It should not have been a gray area. By the way it had been legislated and handled. It had kind of become something of a gray area. Major League Baseball in 2014 introduced expanded instant replay. Baseball was trying to catch up with the NFL and other sports where fans at home could easily see, well, this call was wrong, why can't we reverse it? And so in 2014, Major League Baseball gives every single team a replay video room. And now you have to have a staffer in this room where the manager of the dugout can call in and say, hey, does this play right? Should we challenge it? Should we challenge this call? And so the staffers using video and players using this video on some teams, a couple contending teams, starts to realize, well, we can use this video to our advantage in a different way. And so there is this sanctioned use of video from which this clearly illegal behavior arises. You are not supposed to be using the replay room to be able to in real time steal the other team signs. But the great folly of Major League Baseball in this endeavor is that they didn't realize what would happen if you gave these hyper competitive players in these teams access to something like video. They always want an edge and they found one.

[Lindsey Graham]

So in 2011, this is the year that the Astros hired ex McKinsey consultant Jeff Luno as their general manager. The same year that Moneyball came out as a film based on the book by Michael Lewis, there was change in the water in Major League Baseball. How did Luno change the culture at the Astros though? And how did do you think an adapt or die ethos feature into the rebuilding of the team?

[Evan Drelich]

Before Moneyball, baseball teams were basically trophy prizes for very wealthy men. They were not run with the same ruthless approach that many of these same people applied in their day to day business lives. And Moneyball comes in, it shows that efficiency, which was already taking hold in the outside world, could do wonders for a baseball team. And that a lot of the statistics that were being applied in baseball were not really the best ones. They were not the most accurate predictors of future performance. And so you have this rush among major league owners who see the success of the Oakland A's with a small payroll who want to do the same thing. The big market teams, the Red Sox, the Yankees, all of these teams look around and go, why are we getting beat by these little guys? And so executives who are of an efficiency mindset, who, like Jeff Luno, might have a McKinsey background, are suddenly desirable. And it creates a culture conflict in the sport where there was an old school way and a new school way. And one of the things that baseball teams and a lot of businesses aren't particularly good at and certainly weren't at that time is change management, figuring out the right ways to adapt to new styles and implement new methodologies. And Jeff Luno arrives in St. Louis. The Cardinals hire him as an executive and he helps transform their farm system. Helps turn the Cardinals into more of a powerhouse, but ruffles a lot of feathers along the way.

[Lindsey Graham]

Now, one might expect a consultant, a spreadsheet minded executive to be perhaps bookish or standoffish. But you've described Jeff Leno as charming. Correct.

[Evan Drelich]

Jeff Leno, if you were to have a conversation with him, could knock your socks off. He is charming and he knows how to manage upwards. He was particularly savvy at delivering what he wanted to those above him. I think, in a way, the most powerful and sometimes dangerous people are really the most charismatic. And Luna was very media savvy. In other words, he knew how to play the game. He knew how to curry favor with the public, with the stakeholders that he saw as important. And at the same time, there was another side of him that could treat people working below him very poorly. There were a lot of people fired. When Jeff Luno got to Houston. There was a real ripping the band aid bloodletting process, which is every business owner's right. It was certainly something that had not been done in baseball nearly as aggressively as what the Astros had done before. It's a different culture in baseball where employees work incredibly long hours for very little pay. It is not the case that front office people in baseball are making a lot of money outside of perhaps the top executive. You have scouts, you have back office staff. You have people who really do make a lot of sacrifices in terms of time and schedule for the reward of saying you work for a baseball team, the reward is not in the amount of money you make. And it was not a gentle process. What was undertaken in Houston.

[Lindsey Graham]

Now you were covering the Astros for the Houston Chronicle in this rebuilding period, 2013 to 2016. What was your experience covering the team? How did Luno either charm or otherwise you. What about the owner, Crane?

[Evan Drelich]

I was a young, ambitious reporter who was raised in New York and had worked at New York papers and in Boston. These are major media markets, and, you know, I wasn't going to go into Houston throwing softballs and I think sometimes smaller markets. And Houston, despite being a very large city, it's either third or fourth in population right now. You know, its media market is smaller, and there is a different mentality there. And what the Astros had certainly come to expect is favorable coverage. Jim Crane, the owner of the Astros, had previously had some messy dealings with the media. He had some very public divorces. He also had some major scandals previous to the Astros in his business life and did not have a particular taste for reporters who would question what they were doing. And so I wrote a mix of everything. I wrote what was going on. There were very cool stories about the name of the Astros database, which was called Ground Control, an obvious nod to NASA. And Luno loved giving access to things that made him look good. But if there were ever questions, he did not like it. And there was a point where I wrote a story about how the industry was looking at the Astros as outcasts. This was early in my time there. I look back on it and think it was actually quite an ambitious story for a young reporter. And next year, I believe Jim Crane, the owner and the head of pr, sat down with the two top editors at the Houston Chronicle and lobbied to get me removed from the job. They wanted me fired from covering the Astros. So these things happen. They're not uncommon in baseball or outside of baseball, but they did not react well to people who would dare question their methods.

[Lindsey Graham]

And then even after you did leave the Houston Chronicle, I assume under your own power, you went to work for NBC Sports Boston. It was then that you got information about the Astros sign stealing schemes. I'd like to know who tipped you off and what they said and what you then did about.

[Evan Drelich]

Yeah, I did leave the Houston Chronicle on my own power. I went back to Boston, where I'd come from. I thought it was a better media market and somewhere I could kind of climb. I was covering the Red Sox in October of 2018 when I found out from a firsthand source what was going on in Houston, what had happened during the 2017 World Series and that 2017 season and how they had cheated. I cannot tell you more than that. The original story that broke the scandal cited four sources. One of them was on the record in Picture Mike Fires. But there were three other people whom Ken Rosenthal and I spoke with. But needless to say, upon learning what had happened, and this is 13 months before the story was published, it was flooring. And my first thought where my mind went was, how do I get this?

[Lindsey Graham]

Well, you know, 13 months is an awful long time. And I'm wondering, how do you get a story into shape so that it is published? What did you need? What were the ingredients?

[Evan Drelich]

Well, I was at the time working for a regional sports network in Boston. Regional sports networks, as a broad stroke, are not typically in the business of investigative work. And I started to go down the path of doing a story when I was there, still at NBC. It turns out that for reasons that I believe have nothing to do with this story, they let me go a few months later. I don't exactly know why. So October to 2018 is when I learn about it. February 2019, I'm fired. And, you know, look, I'm sitting at home wondering what the hell's going to happen to my career? It's a bad job market. And I wondered more than once, you know, did I pass on what could have been or probably would have been the biggest story of my life? And I was not taking care of myself. I was not of healthy mind or body at the time. And so it was very difficult. And so to your question, what ingredients did I need? I needed a job. I needed people behind me who believed in the work and that kind of work. And I very fortunate that I did find that at the Athletic with my colleague Ken Rosenthal and many editors behind us.

[Lindsey Graham]

But before this, though, you did write at least a general story on electronic science dealing in November of 2018. How was that received?

[Evan Drelich]

Nobody cared. It was a story that was kind of wonkish. It was pretty inside ball. It was talking about how the league and league officials were starting to crack down on this, because in the 2018 postseason and in 2018 in general, there's a lot of finger pointing in the sport. There was kind of general allegations. There was one report at ESPN about the Astros maybe banging on some garbage cans, but there were no specifics. There was just a lot of teams suspicious of one another. And so it was clearly something that needed to be addressed by the league. And my story was simply discussing how it could be. But, nah, no one cared. The little tidbit about the Astros I had in there wasn't highlighted and it wasn't meant to be highlighted.

[Lindsey Graham]

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[Evan Drelich]

I joined the Athletic in May of 2019 and we don't start working on the story right away. And in hindsight I wish we had. But I was pretty shell shocked. The Astros at the time were a juggernaut of A team. The 2019 Astros were a great baseball team. And no matter when this story was going to be published, it was the kind of thing that it was going to take some convincing of the public, of the people behind Me, you know, who's going to believe that sitting in my notebook? This great franchise, this great story, had actually been cheating. We needed more sources. And so eventually, Ken Rosenthal and I set out to get more. And I'm glad we eventually got it done, it worked out properly. You cannot do a story like that without the right number of sources and confirmation. You can't be a maybe on that type of story.

[Lindsey Graham]

So it is eventually that you and Ken begin digging in to the story itself. And I suppose you discovered all sorts of things, one of which is that this whole scheme, which isn't surprising for an organization led by Jeff Luno, who's a data guy, started with an Excel spreadsheet called Codebreaker. If that's where it started, started, how did it evolve?

[Evan Drelich]

Codebreaker? It sounds sexier than it is, frankly. It's really just a basic log of what pitches the other team was throwing and what sign was put down. And it's something they did in Excel toward the end of the 2016 season. There's a tricky line here where if you are in advance reviewing what had happened in a previous game and before your own game, that's legal. You know, you can look back at a prior game's tape and try to track all the signs, if you like. What then becomes a problem is if you start to apply that in game, if you are doing that actual logging effort in the middle of the game using electronics. But so something that was a legal tool to use in advance, not live during a game, created a clear opportunity going into 2017 for something more to develop. And there was a coach who came over, bench coach Alex Cora, now the manager of the Boston Red Sox, and Carlos Beltron, who very briefly became the manager of the New York Mets, never actually managed a game because of this scandal. And they were friends, and Beltran had been on the Yankees, and the Yankees had conducted a version of electronic sign stealing. Not something as egregious as what the Astros were doing. But they get there, and there is a push to do something more. And so going into 2017, the system.

[Lindsey Graham]

Evolves, but it's not really a smooth evolution. There has to be a pretty obvious crossing of the line out of gray area into not so gray area. And I suppose it happened when a video monitor with a live feed of the game was placed in the tunnel at Minute Maid Park. And I believe you saw personal evidence of this, right? How did this decision get made?

[Evan Drelich]

So Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora get to the Astros, and Beltran certainly knows firsthand what the Yankees had done. What the Yankees had done and what the Red Sox had done in 2016 was they had used the video room to decode signs, and then they would get that information to the dugout. So if a runner got on second base, the runner would know what the key is to the catcher's code. So the runner is still stealing the sign himself when he's on second base. But he has an 8. He knows because of what he was told in the dugout. Okay, that's the third sign. Two means curveball. He knows that when he gets to second base, he doesn't have to try to figure that out on his own. Because of live, real time deciphering that's been going on, the Astros decide, we're going to take this a step farther. We're not going to just have this work when someone is standing on second base. We're going to have this work if no one's on base. And we're going to put in a monitor near the dugout that's going to take this camera feed. The camera is fixed on the catcher, and we're going to have our guys, some staff and some players watch this monitor, decode the signs. And once we know what it is or have a best guess at what's coming, we will make a noise so that the hitter will hear it. And they made a noise, comically, by banging on a garbage can. There was a large garbage can just steps from the Astros dugout. But this is different than anything that had happened before. What had happened before was all based around you still needed a guy on second base. This is entirely off the field. This is a camera to a television monitor, to someone in the tunnel making a noise so that the batter can hear it. And that was the line that was crossed. Both forms of it are cheating to have a guy in second base who had help from the video system. But the Astro system, which could happen on any pitch in real time, to let someone know it's coming is considered much more egregious.

[Lindsey Graham]

So then finally, in 2019, you and your colleague Ken Rosenthal published the expose on the Astros sign stealing scheme for the Athletic. A few days before your story went to press, though, Rosenthal was able to get ahold of a former Astros pitcher, Mike Fiers. And I suppose he was a key ingredient here because he went on the record to confirm sign stealing. Many other players did not. Why do you think Fyres decided to talk? What was the value of him going on the record for your story?

[Evan Drelich]

It does not matter what you are reporting on it is just a fact of reporting life that there is better credibility when people put their names behind what they're talking about. And the sources aren't anonymous. Frankly, there are a lot of stories that you're not going to get someone to go on the record for. And Ken and I had three sources. We had reached a point where we were confident in what we had. These were three individuals who knew firsthand what had gone on. And so we were preparing to publish a story, but we were still going to try. It was kind of a Hail Mary. Well, let's see if we can find somebody. And Ken Rosenthal got Mike Fiers on the phone and Mike Fiers was willing to go on the record with us. In the original story, we quoted Mike Fiers explaining that he wanted the game cleaned up, that he was tired of it. Mike Fires had moved on to a couple other teams and had taken it on himself to warn those teams when going into Houston of what the Astros were doing and what they could be facing there.

[Lindsey Graham]

Were there consequences for Fires?

[Evan Drelich]

I think in any setting, corporate sports, to have someone discuss corruption, to put yourself in a position, as did happen with Mike Fiers, where the public and others are going to say, well, you're a rat. You know, you snitched on us. Which I think is totally unfair. You know, whistleblowers, it takes a lot of courage to do it. And I think it's a great burden for someone to decide to step out, particularly in sports where there's a clubhouse culture and locker room culture and, you know, what happens between us stays with us and machismo and all that. It was a bold thing for him to do. I've seen some awful things said about Mike Fiers. Anybody who's been kind of tied to this, I think Mike Fire's war, certainly the brunt of it, with people writing about him being a quote, unquote rat and things of that nature. Just, just ugly stuff. When, particularly if you're in the media, your job should be pursuing the truth. Your job is not to protect the clubhouse environment. Your job is reality and presenting reality to people. So I don't want to speak for Mike, but he saw some ugly stuff, there's no question about that.

[Lindsey Graham]

So it sounds like there was some definitely mixed reception to your expose. But in general, how do you think it was received by the public in the baseball world?

[Evan Drelich]

I think most people were outraged within hours. John Boy, who is a Yankees fan who's turned himself into a full time media member and production company, puts together a video backing up exactly what we said in the story. And so the story is circulating, and very quickly afterward, the video is circulating, and people were just outraged. Players were outraged. The story comes out in November, when spring training begins in February. The players couldn't stop talking about it. It was like this fire that couldn't be put out. And now were Astros fans angry? Of course. But on a whole, people were stunned because there was suspicion amongst other players and other teams about what was going on. But there had been nothing concrete. And people were kind of in disbelief that, wow, they would do that. They would really go to that level. And as a World Series winning team, it was a jarring thing for the baseball world.

[Lindsey Graham]

You mentioned suspicions about other teams, and clearly your story was about the Astros specifically. But, you know, rumors were going around about all sorts of teams doing all sorts of things. Were the Astros the only team using technology to gain an edge in the game?

[Evan Drelich]

No, definitively, they were not the only team using technology. But there is this dividing line that exists between what the Astros were doing and what the other teams that we know were doing. The Red Sox, the Yankees, based on my reporting, the Dodgers, big market, veteran teams, strong contending teams at the time, had figured out that they could use this video replay room in game to gain something of an edge. And the form that that took was guys would go from the video room to the dugout, say, hey, you get on second base, this is the code. This is what you need to know. Guy gets on second base, okay, he knows that is still cheating. And you can argue the former commissioner, Fay Vincent, did argue that any cheating is cheating. And we shouldn't be kind of assigning more to different varieties of it. But the reality is that within the sport, what the other teams were doing is regarded by most as having paled in comparison to what the Astros were doing. Because again, the Astros removed any pretense of having someone on the field of play. It was entirely off the field of play. And I think that is why it was so jarring for people is to think that the competition you are watching when Alex Bregman, an Astros player, swings at a curveball with two strikes on him, he's one pitch away from striking out and he hits a home run. And you hear that garbage can bang right before he hits that home run and there's nobody standing on second base, I had a visceral reaction. It really just kind of spits in the face of competition and the quote, unquote, integrity of the game.

[Lindsey Graham]

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[Evan Drelich]

You know, the Astros at this point didn't have a leg left to stand on. They had during the preceding postseason. So during the 2019 postseason had tried to call a Sports Illustrated reporter, Stephanie Epstein, a liar about a totally separate incident from science stealing that there was an executive with the Astros who had screamed in the direction of three women in the clubhouse. And this incident gained a lot of attention and led to the executive being fired during the postseason. But the Astros first reaction, as often was their first reaction, was to try to attack the credibility of the reporter. They were a particularly aggressive a franchise with the media when this happened, to some degree, it was out of their hands at this point. The Commissioner's office of Major League Baseball was involved now, and Major League Baseball, frankly, it had enough of the Astros. The incident I was just describing had taken away a lot of attention during the 2019 postseason. The Commissioner's office is not like when attention is taken away from what's going on on the field during the postseason. The postseason is the jewel of the baseball season. And the Astros had been a controversial franchise, period. The consultant, McKinsey style culture that Jeff Luno brought in, there had been small controversy after small controversy with them, and their credibility was gone. They handled a spring training press conference very poorly, did nothing to put out the flames at that point. But media relations is one of the weakest points about the Astros.

[Lindsey Graham]

So then the Astros are facing the consequences here. What were the consequences, though? Did your reporting or any investigation find that most of the Astros were in on the scheme or only a few?

[Evan Drelich]

If you were on that team and in that dugout, you knew what was going on. It would have been very difficult not to, unless perhaps you were there for a day or two. Major League Baseball issues the maximum allowable fine. And this is maximum allowable as set by the Major League Constitution, which all the other owners decide. And it's $5 million, which it sounds like a lot of money to the layperson. It is not a lot of money in a industry that takes in at the time, probably 10 or $11 billion a year. Now it's up to about a dozen, but it was the maximum allowable fine. There were also draft picks. The Astros first two draft picks in the subsequent drafts were taken away, and that hurts your ability to restock your talent by the fact that the Astros were a good team. Those draft picks were at the end of the draft order, and so they're not as valuable as they would have been if they had been a bad team. They did not discipline the players. The players were granted immunity in this process. The Astros did not have their title stripped. They were able to keep the championship. The manager of the team, AJ Hinge, was fired. The bench coach at the time, who had then gone on to the Red Sox, Alex Cora, was fired. Carlos Beltran, who had taken over the Mets as manager, just that same off season, he was fired and Jeff Luno was fired. So probably the biggest and most impactful happening was the dismissal of four people across three different teams at that point. But the players themselves escaped punishment because Manfred believed that if he had tried to punish that the union would have been able to overturn or vacate those punishments. He thought that was going to be a mistake, that he would look weak. It turns out in hindsight that he looks weaker having not tried. The fact that he granted immunity at all is something that he's acknowledged publicly. Probably wasn't the right decision.

[Lindsey Graham]

But in a rare example of the buck stops here, Jeff Luna was fired. Did face some consequences, although the investigation didn't find that he personally really knew a lot about the scheme. Tell us what was discovered and what you think about that.

[Evan Drelich]

The investigation appeared to be pretty thorough. There were tens of thousands of messages reviewed and different cell phones collected throughout the organization. Email, Slack, WhatsApp, different things, you name it. Major League Baseball's Department of Investigations got in there. What the commissioner's office found is that the general manager should have been aware of what was going on. There was not direct evidence or I guess, conclusive evidence that Jeff Leno knew about the sign stealing. It is the case that Jeff Leno, along with every other relevant Astros person, was instructed not to delete their cell phones because their cell phones were going to be reviewed. And Jeff Leno did delete his cell phone. He did that on the excuse that he had personal photos of his wife during childbirth that he didn't want the investigators to see. That is something that after the fact, no one can prove. I think it's a questionable look when your top executive is erasing their cell phone in the middle of a serious investigation like that.

[Lindsey Graham]

So if those were the consequences, were they enough?

[Evan Drelich]

I think the outrage of fans in subsequent years has shown that it was not sufficient players on other teams, fans. It is the topic that I think it's still perhaps most often talked about is why didn't those guys get anything? Why weren't they suspended? One of the challenges would have been figuring out how do you parcel out those suspensions? How many gains do you give hitters versus pitchers? Is there a difference? What about the amount of time you spend on the team? You know, discipline is usually issued for individual cheating in baseball. It's performance enhancing, drug use. If you use steroids, okay, you get an 80 game suspension. Well, what do you do when. When it's 25 guys at a given time and you've had, you know, a couple dozen more come through the team throughout the entire season? Rob Manford made this choice that if the players union had overturned or vacated these, that he would look weak and that that would be the worst possible outcome. And the fury that fans and players had about the fact that the Astros weren't disciplined, I think is made clear even to the commissioner. In hindsight, that was not the right approach.

[Lindsey Graham]

But despite their immunity, these players in your reporting and the investigation, were all party to the cheating. How did they justify what they were doing?

[Evan Drelich]

I think the players justified cheating the way we see people in corporate America justify their corrupt practices. While we think someone else is doing it, or perhaps we know someone else is doing and we need to do this to keep up. It's the only way we're going to succeed. And there was a warning issued late in 2017 because of the Red Sox and Yankees who had been caught with that lesser scheme at that time. And the Astros kept going. They kept going into the postseason doing something more egregious than what the Red Sox and Yankees were doing. And so they were a runaway train in a lot of respects. But they're having success. Why would they stop it? I mean, there have been players who have talked about it in those terms. Why would you stop something that's working?

[Lindsey Graham]

What about players on other teams throughout the league once this is uncovered, surely they have feelings of their own.

[Evan Drelich]

Oh, players on other teams were in disbelief. LeBron James was tweeting about it. A player from a totally different sport. Look, there were some players who probably were expressing outrage when they themselves had done the lesser version of it. The Los Angeles Dodgers lost to the astros in the 2017 World Series. If there is a team that you can look at and say probably has a claim as the most victimized by this, it might be them. It might be the New York Yankees, who the Astros beat in the previous round of the playoffs to get to the World Series. Players on those teams were outraged. And those teams did not have perfectly clean hands because they had used their replay rooms in ways they shouldn't have. But there's no Evidence that the Yankees or the Dodgers or any other team to this point, to this day, were doing something on the level of what the Astros were doing, conducting a cheating scheme entirely off the field without anybody on base, without even the pretense of pretending like this was something that was legal or even close to legal.

[Lindsey Graham]

So you've indicated that, and I understand it too, how difficult it may be to parcel out punishment to players depending on how much they were involved in the scheme. But I'm wondering what you think could have been done, what should have been done to really put the true consequences into action for this scandal.

[Evan Drelich]

The great failure here that's not often discussed is in the years prior the commissioner's office and to some degree the individual front offices and teams, not realizing what could have come from handing these video tools to these hyper competitive individuals, to not seeing that after baseball's great performance enhancing drug scandal, the steroid scandals of the late 90s and early 2000s, that these are individuals who have given an opportunity to find an edge and gain an edge. We'll take it. And the irony of it is that the commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, was MLB's leading figure handling the steroid scandal. And it's like he forgot what these players were capable of doing and the league forgot its responsibility to protect the integrity of the sport.

[Lindsey Graham]

So where do we stand today in terms of the integrity of the sport in science dealing and the use of technology?

[Evan Drelich]

Mlb, after the science stealing scandal, put in an electronic solution. The catchers now have the option of wearing a wrist device that can communicate with the pitcher through a little headset and tell the pitcher what's coming. So you've eliminated the very traditional, in some ways iconic act in baseball of a catcher physically giving a sign that the catcher is no longer flashing 1, 2 or 3 or whatever signal before a pitch. In some instances it is not mandatory, but that is in place. There are also restrictions around video usage during games. The league issues iPad that if players are going to look at their swing or how they're throwing the ball during the game, they have to use these league issued iPads in the dugout. And there are video delays in the clubhouse, the locker room where players can sometimes go into during the game. So they've put in parameters to try to protect against this kind of cheating in the future. Of course, it is the case, as is often the case in baseball, that they did not erect the stop sign until there was an accident.

[Lindsey Graham]

Is it possible to find enough rules, enough regulations, enough firewalls to stop people from seeking an advantage.

[Evan Drelich]

People are always going to cheat in baseball. Outside of baseball, any sport, any corporate setting, there's always going to be somebody trying to get an edge. I don't think there's any doubt people are still cheating in some capacity, in some ways in baseball. Whether we know about it is a different question.

[Lindsey Graham]

And cheating in baseball is as old as the sport itself. From Black Sox in 1919 to the drug abuse in the 80s and 90s, why was this scandal such a big story?

[Evan Drelich]

I think because in modern times there haven't been quite as many team wide cheating scandals. It's because the Astros were already a controversial franchise and they won the World Series. This wasn't just some team. This was the winning team, the supposed best team, at the end of an incredibly long 162 game regular season preceded by a month and a half of spring training followed by the postseason. And it feels deceptive to people. I think it just makes you question whether what you're seeing is real. And there were rumors, they are not confirmed, but people started wondering, well, could players be going to the plate with buzzers to know what pitch is coming? And the reality is unless you set up a TSA style body scanner, you cannot prove that. I cannot tell you that nobody went to the plate with a buzzer. You can't prove the negative, the injury here. The saddest part of all of this is that people start asking those kinds of questions, you're sitting there doubting the veracity of what you have watched on the field that night. And so what should be a joyous escape from the real world where you're looking at the green grass and eating hot dogs and keeping score becomes this game of back and forth questions with your buddies. You think they were up to something. What were those guys doing? And that is the damage they have damaged the trust that people have that what they are watching is on the level.

[Lindsey Graham]

Well, Evan Drelich, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal.

[Evan Drelich]

Thanks Lindsey.

[Lindsey Graham]

That was my conversation with Evan Drelich, senior writer for the Athletic Covering Baseball. He's the author of the book Winning Fixes Everything How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports Biggest Mess Wondery plus subscribers can binge American Scandal early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts if you enjoy American Scandal, be sure to give us a five star rating and leave a review. I read every one of them. I also have two other Wondery podcasts you might like. American History Tellers and Business movers. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. And before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey and to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, go to notthatlindseygraham.com that's not that Lindsey Graham American Scandal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by Polly Striker. Our senior interview producer is Peter A.R. cooney, sound design by Gabriel Gould, music by Lindsey Graham produced by John Reed Managing Producer Olivia Fonte, Senior Producer Andy Herman, development by Stephanie Jens and executive producers are Jenny Lauer, Beckman, Mar Marshall, Louie and Aaron O'Flaherty for wondering. Hello, this is Simon Mayo. And this is Mark kermode. He's the UK's best and most trusted film critic. He's a best selling writer, broadcaster and national treasure. Far too kind. Kermode and Mayo's Take has all the reviews you need and star guests such as Sir Ian McKellen. Nice to be with you. Emma Stone that sounds like something I would love to be a part of.

[Evan Drelich]

Ewan McGregor I'm very good. How are you doing?

[Lindsey Graham]

Kate Planchette what was that word word you used?

[Evan Drelich]

Cattywampus.

[Lindsey Graham]

Coma de Mayo's take All the film you need available wherever you get your podcasts.